Interface Children & Family Services outlines 2-1-1 hotline usage, highlights Thousand Oaks mental-health contacts

Kelly Brown, community information officer at Interface Children & Family Services, briefed the council on the Ventura County 2-1-1 information-and-referral service and its local usage patterns. Brown said 2-1-1 provides year-round phone, text and web referrals to health, housing and basic-needs services and operates across multiple counties.

Brown summarized countywide and local statistics: she said the Ventura County 2-1-1 network responds to roughly 300,000 individuals annually and supports search traffic and referrals through 211ventura.org. For Thousand Oaks specifically, Brown told the council that in February 2024 the service handled about 1,600 unique contacts from the city; roughly 884 of those contacts involved housing help (her presentation grouped low-income housing, rental assistance and homelessness-related requests together as the top need).

Brown also said that mental-health and substance-use support was the second-most common category in Thousand Oaks (she noted Thousand Oaks and neighboring Camarillo were the only local cities where those needs placed in the top three). She described several statewide and county partnerships routed through 2-1-1: a tobacco-cessation referral program (Brown said more than 3,000 Ventura County residents stopped using tobacco through the program over roughly three years and that 75% of those remained tobacco-free after one year), a public-safety power-shutoff response program that links electricity-dependent residents with backup resources and hotel placements during outages, and the Ventura versus Hate reporting partnership.

Brown invited council members to request ZIP-code level service data for Thousand Oaks. She said 2-1-1 can perform intake and, when callers are imminently homeless or already unhoused, place them into the county Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) and help prioritize shelter or supportive housing placements.